


The Other Side

by SegaBarrett



Category: Ashes to Ashes (UK TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:28:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27949061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Alex and Gene are assigned the odd case of a missing child.
Relationships: Alex Drake/Gene Hunt
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5
Collections: Mistletoe Exchange 2020





	The Other Side

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inquisitor_tohru](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inquisitor_tohru/gifts).



Alex Drake wasn’t entirely sure if she had just gotten up early, or if she had never gone to bed at all. She had the folder opened on the bed, pictures spilling out from the most recent case she had been assigned. 

It was a kidnapping – of course, the kind of thing that kept Alex up more than anything else, considering that it was a ten-year-old girl who looked more like Molly than Alex would care to admit. 

The leads had been few – as Gene had declared it, little Isabella Horton’s parents were “knackers”, which hadn’t been helping the investigation very much. But Alex was going to try all over again, because that was what she did. Maybe that was why she had been sent back to 1981 in the first place.

When she arrived at the Hortons' place, Isabella’s mother, whose name was Victoria, was sitting on the porch, smoking, and looking around.

“Is there anyone who might want to take Isabella?” Alex inquired. 

“No. Who would?” Victoria inquired. “No one ever paid attention to us, or to her. I thought she just got lost. Maybe took a wrong way home. Maybe she still did.” Victoria paused and let out a little giggle. “Maybe she’s looking for us like we’re looking for her. Except they said not to look for her and to stay here.” Victoria paused and yelled, “Hershel! Get in here. We got another copper out looking for Isabella.”

Hershel walked over and looked at Alex, then scoffed.

“A lady copper,” he said. “Well, I’ll tell you what I told the ol’ bloke just the same. I’m not that surprised Isabella’s run off. After all, she was always an odd one.”

“What do you mean by an odd one?” Alex inquired.

“Well, night before she vanished, went downstairs and she was sitting on the couch just starin’ at the test card.”

***

“Why did you even go back and talk to them?” Gene asked when she got back to the station. “I told you, the parents don’t know anything. They probably know next to nothing, or whatever they know is the reason why the kid got snatched in the first place.”

“Like, the parents could be involved in something criminal?” Chris piped up. “But like what?”

“Drugs,” Ray declared, and everyone looked at him. “I just mean, isn’t it usually drugs? I’m just cutting ahead. Don’t look at me like that.”

“Well, don’t,” Gene replied, “I hear you attempting to think, Carling, and that’s gotten you into trouble before.”

Ray seemed to be rolling his eyes, but he also stood up a little straighter.

“I think we should also consider the fact that maybe the little girl ran away,” Alex said, “Her parents seem a little bit… dysfunctional, so it’s possible that she went away to try to get away from them and ended up getting lost somewhere.”

“Like where?” Gene fired back, “Up a mountain top, grazing with the sheep? It’s all city streets for miles from her house.” 

“Kids go playing in things they shouldn’t all the time,” Alex said, “It’s why they stopped making those old refrigerators.”

“What kind of old refrigerators?” Gene asked, and Alex paused.

“Well, they’ll probably stop making them eventually. We should let people know to scan the area and see anywhere a kid could go to try and do some kind of a hideout. Old abandoned buses. Dumps. Anything like that.”

“Or, we could start rousting up anyone who looks suspicious,” Gene countered.

“Maybe it’s some kind of a ransom plot,” Chris suggested. 

“From those two?” Ray fired back, “Unless it brings us back to drugs…”

“We’re talking in circles,” Gene said. “DI Drake and I will… go look at some old refrigerators. Ray and Chris, you go find Shaz and go talk to anyone connected with the parents who might have had a reason to pull some kind of a ransom. Don’t do anything stupid. Where is Shaz, anyway?”

"You asked her to investigate that murder case. You sent her to Croydon."

"Well, why did she go there? Tell her to come back."

***

“Don’t do anything stupid?” Alex inquired, looking out the passenger window of the Quatro as they drove down the road. “Was that almost caring I heard in your voice, Gene Hunt?”

“It was more so stating the obvious. I’m surrounded by idiots,” he replied. “You most of all.”

“Well, thank you,” Alex replied, “Let’s go see what’s happened to this little girl.” 

Alex wasn’t sure if the strange sense of foreboding she was feeling was due to thinking of Molly or something else. Sometimes, these cases seemed to mean something far and beyond what was actually happening in them, and this was one of those times. She wondered if this little girl had reappeared in the present day, if the adult woman was passing over Alex’s hospital bed and looking at her. If she was, was she gazing at her thankfully or accusingly? It was hard to tell, sometimes, where one ended and another began.

“So, where did you even come up with this idea?” Gene asked. “Did you get trapped in the boot of a car once when you were little?”

Alex didn’t like thinking back to her childhood, all those new redefined moments that she had found out the reality of far too recently (or far too long away – the way to measure time was tricky, now, and had long since stopped making sense), but she was able to shake her head at that one.

“I just remember hearing about it on the news. They’d have to rescue kids all the time around where I lived, and they started making new kinds of refrigerators that you could get yourself out of if you needed to.”

“If you needed to,” Gene declared. “I would just bloody well not get in one to begin with.”

***

“Yoo hoo!” Gene exclaimed, tromping around the junkyard. “Little girl! Any little girls here anywhere! Yoo hoo!”

“Extremely subtle, DCI Hunt,” Alex said dryly. “You do know that if she’s passed out somewhere, she’s probably not going to call back ‘Oi, I’m here’, right?”

“Make it bloody well easier if she did.”

Alex rolled her eyes a moment before looking down.

“What’s this?”

“What’s what?”

Alex moved a step closer to Gene to show him a small, off-white envelope that was oddly clean despite sitting in the middle of a dump. She slowly took out the note inside and blinked.

“‘I have what you’re looking for. Come to the Tyler Inn’,” Alex read aloud. 

“Interesting name,” Gene mused. “So, now do you think it’s a kidnapping or not?”

“I think things just got more complicated, certainly,” she replied, “But we won’t know what’s going on until we get there.”

“To the Quatro!” Gene announced. “Let’s go tune up some kidnappers and get to the pub.”

***

The Tyler Inn looked as if it had last been used approximately ten years earlier – the outside was peeling and the balcony looked as if it was hanging by a thread.

“It’s weird that they didn’t ask for something,” Alex mused, “If it’s some kind of a ransom plot, why wouldn’t they ask for money? Not to mention, how did they know that we were even going to be there?”

“Forget all that,” Gene replied, “Let’s just get in and get out before the place collapses entirely.”

Alex made her way up the staircase to the balcony, feeling it creak as Gene stepped up behind her. 

“There was a room number on that… invitation… I hope?” Gene inquired. “I don’t want to know what’s even going on in most of these rooms.”

“I don’t think there was. It just said the Tyler Inn,” Alex replied, and then the door right in front of them – the door to room 37 – opened slowly, as if it was being pulled back by some unseen force.

“We might have our answer there,” Gene mused, taking his sidearm from its holster and raising it. “Come on out with your hands on your head!”

There was no response from the door, only silence and a looming bright light that began to build in the doorway.

“Maybe they left in a hurry,” Gene mused. He took a slow, creeping side-step towards the door. 

“Isabella!” Alex called. “Isabella, are you in there?”

She stepped around the corner, moving ahead of Gene in a swift push, and walked into the room, finding only a rumbled bed and the television on.

To the test card.

“Isabella?” Alex called again.

She had seen a lot of things on the police force, in both the “present day” (which she wasn’t even sure was the present anymore, but she should leave that alone) and now, back here, with Gene Hunt. But nothing had made her jump as much as…

The little girl jumped up in the TV set and looked straight at her.

“Hello, Alex Drake. Hello, Gene Hunt.”

“…Isabella?” Alex inquired, even though that couldn’t be real. Otherwise, she was really going to rethink watching _Poltergeist_ when it came out next year. 

“Hello,” the girl said again, with a smile. “You found me.”

“What in the blazes is this?” Gene declared.

“Sam Tyler… In his report, he talked about the girl who would pop up on the test card screen. Not just the picture, but would actually talk to him,” Alex said, cocking her head to the side. “I remember that.”

“But if Tyler saw her, it can’t be Isabella, could it?” Gene asked. 

“Well, this is the Tyler Inn,” Alex pointed out. “And I don’t want to be the one to point it out, but it seems like sometimes things around here aren’t always what they seem.”

She took a step towards the TV and stared directly into it. 

“Isabella? Are you in there?”

The test card was standard and stagnant, looking back at her and frozen in time, and Alex wondered if she had imagined it. The girl did look like Isabella, though, but maybe every blonde girl looked a little bit like Test Card F.

“Isabella?” Gene called. “Listen, it’s seriously time to stop messing about and to go home!”

“I’m not going home.”

It was definitely her, now, looking back at them and having moved away from her blackboard tic-tac-toe game, flashing a look of annoyance. 

“Or, rather. I am home.”

Alex and Gene exchanged looks, then stared back over at the TV.

“Isabella, you get out of that TV right this instant!” Alex declared. 

“Is this happening right now?” Gene inquired. 

“Tell my parents that they did a pretty good job,” Isabella said in the TV, “But my place is here.”

And with that, the Test Card Girl turned and walked away from her blackboard entirely.

***

Alex dragged her hand over her face.

“How exactly are we supposed to write that up, Gene?” she inquired.

“Case report – everything knackers. Case closed,” Gene replied, “Sounds good enough for me.”

Alex let out a long sigh.

“It feels like we need more answers,” she said.

“Haven’t you figured it out by now? We’re not really likely to get many answers. Not every case is… answerable. Sometimes you just have to close the door on it." As if to punctuate the point, Gene stepped over and shut the door to the office with a click.

Alex leaned against the glass door.

“Is anyone else here?” 

“They all went home,” Gene said, pausing, “I sent them home.”

“To process?”

“So I can drink in peace. Should have sent you home too, Drake.”

She put her hands up and shrugged.

“What’s home?”

“A test card, I guess,” Gene replied. He reached over and plucked his canteen from the desk behind him, taking a swig. “Hey, Drake…”

“What?” Alex asked.

Gene leaned in, pressing a kiss to Alex’s lips that seemed desperate somehow, wanting, and she wasn’t sure if it was being there with him in that enclosed place (1981 seemed to always feel enclosed, though she wasn’t sure it that meant that it felt trapped or if it felt safe, or maybe both somehow), or if it was the day’s strange events, or if it was something else entirely that made her kiss back, but either way, she found herself pressing Gene back against the file cabinet and panting when she came back up for air.

“You really want to spend your time like this when you could get sucked into a telly at any second?” Gene asked.

Alex considered it, then looked back through the glass door, and then back at Gene.

“They’ve really all gone home?” she asked. 

He shrugged.

“Told ‘em all to bugger off. Does that change anything?”

Alex closed her eyes and then opened them. The future, or the present, or whatever it was… it seemed to be fading out of her fingers a little more each day. But in the moment, that didn’t matter.

“Kiss me again and find out,” Alex replied, and then chuckled and added, _“They’re herrreee…”_

“Who’s here?” Gene echoed.

And Alex kissed him.


End file.
